Thursday, December 25, 2008








It's another day in Paradise! We did two dives today at a new place for us...SiaMil, an island about 45 minutes from Mabul. Great dives along a nice wall with lots of stuff to look at. First dive had blue ribbon eels, cuttlefish, TWO pgymy seahorses (1/4") and lots of other cool stuff. Second dive had a giant pink frogfish, peacock mantis shrimp and crocodile fish galore along with lots of hard & soft corals...really, really beautiful!Third dive of the day was over at Maki Point at Kapalai. It was a great dive to start with....robust ghostpipefish, ornate ghostpipefish, mantis shrimp, shrimp gobies and nudibranchs. Bob & I were tailing behind the group and making our safety stop at 15' when Ron, our diveguide, wrote the magic words on his slate..............BLUE RING! Wow, thank goodness we both had plenty of air left in our tanks! It was our very first blue ring and even though we'd seen pictures and knew they were small...it was still hard to realize that it was an octopus! They are only about 2-1/2" long and change colors as they cruise the reeftop feeding...needless to say, our cameras got quite a workout! Enjoy a couple of the pictures!Tomorrow 1/2 of the group will head to Sipadan Island for three dives. It's now a World Heritage site and they are severely limiting the number of divers per day. With almost a dozen resorts in the immediate area, it certainly limits the number of times you can dive there during a vacation, so we'll probably have to be content with only one day of diving there for each diver...which makes all of us sad because it's such fabulous diving, but in the interest of protecting the fragile reefs and the fantastic turtle population, we certainly understand.....

That's all for today...hope everyone's holidays are being spent sharing quality time with families & friends.


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